Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. What does this have to do with salvia. “Bear” with me.

In case you *don’t* know, and have been living down one of those inter-dimensional folds between ensagement membranes for the last five years, that childhood stronghold The Berenstein Bears has changed its name to Berenstain. Except it hasn’t…because thousands, tens of thousands of people remember it as Berenstein, and for whom the name “Berenstain” attached to their nostalgic love is not only an affront, but an absurdity.

Don’t believe me? Go to Youtube and call up *any* Berenstein/stain bears video, scroll down to the comments field, and it shouldn’t be long before you come across people saying “WTF…wasn’t this Berenstein?” Etc.

All the books and legitimate physical sources trackable out there at this time point read Berenstain. People have dug out their old childhood books from grandma’s attic to prove to naysayers and internet bullies that they were Stein…only to discover that they were Stain.

So it’s a simple enough problem, right? Memory is fallible. That’s even pretty much a known fact. That girl Mary you were sweet on at school and you spent all your time obsessing about? You meet her again much later in life and find out it is Marie. Disconcerting…to say the least.But to my mind, in this instance anyway, that explanation has at least two problems…and possibly more.

First, there is the issue of why this particular word. It’s not enough just to assert. It would need to be SHOWN, by actual empirical experiment, that the word “Berenstain” was in some sense super-susceptible to be misread as “Stein.” The evidence for this is not much persuasive…when was the last time you went home from the cinema with your tail between your legs because Bride of Frankenstain was playing…except you’d booked Bride of Frankenstein, and your ticket is worthless? Or you tried to get to grips with Einstain’s theory of relativity, only to throw the book at the wall in frustration?

Second, why did the discover of this discrepancy only surface within the last five years. If this was a habitual mistake, then people would ALWAYS have been making it…yet look for yourself, there is no discussion of this issue traceable anywhere on the webs that has an incept date much beyond five years ago.

Third…and most mysteriously, I leave you with…human memory may well be “fallible”….but there might be an entirely different reason for that than we have supposed.

The emerald doors of the ensagement shuttle hiss open and our intrepid Membranout steps out amid swirls of steam onto the platform. His host awaits, a slight, gnomish looking fellow with a peculiar Queen Anne’s Lace design on his waistcoat, which seems to be moving in fractal spaces as he talks.

The host doesn’t shake hands with his guest. Instead a parasitic new hand sprouts from his elbow and wags in the air, seizing Intrepid by the wrist.

“Dr. Living Stone, I presume?”

Intrepid doesn’t get the joke.

“You must be tired from your…uh…journey. Please…step inside and make yourself at home. I have hot eyeball juice and pink elf stew bubbling on the stove.”

Intrepid crosses the threshold and takes a seat, as the gnome collapses into a chair just opposite him. He doesn’t collapse “into” a chair…he collapses into a chair. But he quickly shakes himself back to normal, and this time actually takes a seat.

Intrepid can’t help looking around. The hands on that big clock on the wall seem to rotate together, counterclockwise, never stopping. A hamster runs inside a wheel on a nearby table. Intrepid blinks and looks again. The hamster is mechanical, but the wheel itself seems to be bolted together out of millions of tiny hamster owners. Grinning elves bob gently in structures like lava lamps, their heads separating off and joining up again…though not always with the same shoulders.

“Nice place you have here.”

The gnome pulls out a big book in front of his chest and begins flicking the pages. Actually, the book IS the front of his chest…but enough of that. “This is the world you’re looking for” he says.

“I don’t understand you.”

The gnome snorts far back in his throat. “Yes, you do. You wanted to know why we did it, and I’m telling you.”

“The Bears? Oh come on, you gotta be kidding me?”

“Oh this happens all the time. All WE did was tweak the system, so that this time you remembered it.”

He leans forward in his seat. “Think about it, Consemite Sam. You don’t change the Statue of Liberty into a giant Phallus, because people will freak the heck out and start another war. You change something that has the smallest conceivable impact on physical matter…you flip a lexical detail, one letter in the name of a childhood character long ago… but while it has the least physical impact, it also has the MOST emotional impact, because it’s the heart of their childhood.”

Intrepid fidgets uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t believe you. No one cares.”

“You don’t see too good with those human eyes, do you? Yes they do. That’s why tens of thousands of people are affected by it. You bypass all conceivable structures of “authority” and you start a conversation on the ground, among ordinary people. You reach right down into the sparking guts of the reality engine and you tamper with the very thing that matters in the superglue of their consensus world…bedrock beliefs.”

Then a sudden wind blows all his pages shut inside his chest. He goes all square and hardback on our intrepid explorer and hops right back up onto his own shelf…alongside all the other books on antigravity bongs and parallel realities.

WoW, Panther.When I first read the OP, I thought, “Oh no, this guy Panther I was communicating with might be an escapee from an insane asylum. But then I remembered my own OP in the bestelectionever thread.

You're right. There is a connection between this phenomenon and salvia, because they both attempt to look behind the curtain of the Great Oz.

First of all, you would have been a great guest on “Art Bell”. Also, are you writing a book about parallel realities, and are you trying to get feedback from us salvia heads? This aspect would make a good chapter, and the salvia connection would make another good chapter.

Even though I call bullshit on 80-100 percent of the “Mandela Effect” examples, I still have to admit it could be true. It's a FANTASTIC way for the population_at_large to contemplate the idea of other possible worlds. I see that “Reddit” has been following this as well. Unfortunately, “the mandela effect”, in my opinion, has a stigma that puts it in the same basket as “Big Foot Sightings.” You want to hear something similar to the “mandela effect”? Here it is, and it gets back to Art Bell.

I was a listener to Art Bell in the early 1980s when he was broadcasting out of Las Vegas before he was syndicated. One night on leap year, Feb 29th, late 1980s, I was listening to his show (still only broadcasting out of LV). His guest was the bizarre, exceedingly unbelievable John Lear. So I'm listening to them when suddenly, out of nowhere, this very strange series of audible tones starts to interfere with the broadcast. The broadcast frequency of the tones was the same as the broadcast frequency of the radio station KDWN. When Art started taking calls from the listeners, some of them began mentioning these very soothing, very odd tones. Well, I don't know, I might have been stoned at the time, so I called up the show and said, “Art, this show is no longer about John Lear, IT'S ABOUT THESE MYSTERY TONES.” Anyway, the mystery tones actually made the local news in Las Vegas the next day, and Art did a few follow up comments about them. But the whole story faded away and was soon forgotten. I even wrote Art about the tones and he wrote me back. I no longer have the letter. Of course, Art and John could have concocted the whole thing.

Here's the point: I've never heard a repeat of the show, and whenever I google “Art Bell John Lear tones” or any other combination of words, I get NOTHING, ZILTCH, NADA. IT'S BEEN WIPED CLEAN!

Last edited by peoploid on Sun Dec 25, 2016 1:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.

peoploid wrote:When I first read the OP, I thought, “Oh no, this guy Panther I was communicating with might be an escapee from an insane asylum. But then I remembered my own OP in the bestelectionever thread.

Haha. Touché. The nutjob is always the other guy, right? I am just being playful.

Do I really think salvia beings tweaked the Berenstein Bears? Probably not, but who knows? Reality being more strange than we can imagine, and so on.

It could still be parallel realities and yet a natural occurrence. This might happen all the time, but I don’t think that we should *remember* it…that’s the part that seems to carry an eerie flavor of “intervention.” You engineer people’s belief in parallel realities on the ground, and by doing so you make consensus reality itself just a fraction less “sticky.”? Maybe.

Or maybe it was purely natural, and for some reason this time we carry the memory. A sequence like this:

1) It was originally “Berenstein”.2) Then the internet and especially social media came along, and *for whatever reason* a large enough bunch of people became persuaded that it was “Berenstain.” Perhaps there was even a typo in a print run of the books or their videos? Who knows?3) The mass of this belief becomes enough to create a minor track switch in consensus reality…*for everybody.*4) All physical traces and events right back into history are now consistent with “Berenstain” and Berenstain only, because the universe has switched tracks. That mistake in the print run never happened now, and you’ll never find it, because it was in the Berenstein universe.

And now, if you'll excuse me, there’s a van pulling up outside. I think it may be time for my medication...